wattpad.com is a popular website where mostly young people host their fiction so it get votes and visibility.

I was feeling lonely, and my usual online mates are not enthusiastic about reading my stuff, and I am always in search of feedback. So I got in touch with online groups for those who have an interest in writing. Mostly young people who, seemingly in their early 20s, give or take. Someone asked me if I was making something for the "Wattys", which I later learned is Wattpad's literary award. Another gave me a link to read his stuff on Wattpad. I had to make an account to read it on my phone. Annoying, but they kinda asked me nicely, so I installed it and created an account. Way too many hoops just to read some text, but okay! I started reading. There was an ad below, but that's okay. Suddenly, my phone was taken over by a full-screen ad. A full-screen ad. FOR TEXT. That was too much so I started looking for a way to read Wattpad outside of Wattpad. Maybe there is, but I paused my search to make this post.

Displaying text is a solved problem, and it has been for quite some time. It is so fucking trivial, I coud write a novel right here on this text box! I now hate Wattpad with such a passion, I don't think I'm reading that kid's story!

Wattpad feels like someone trying to fuck up reading.

On another note, I find it a little unsettling how these kids seem more concerned with their marketing than their writing. They have full press kits even before they learn the basics of writing proper sentences. There is also no love for short stories, they start writing novels as soon as they start writing. Everything is a novel with twenty chapters. I'm pretty sure Wattpad has a hand in that. But maybe that's just me being old, so feel free to disregard that.

I get the idea of a website that helps readers find authors, but in some sense at least, Wattpad feels like a water popsicle an I hate it.

So I've been playing a lot of WoW lately and that includes a ton of raids, always with voice chat on discord. Just now I found out that someone is a streamer and broadcast a full raid + the voice chat.

I was not part of this particular raid thankfully. And as far as I can tell he doesn't have a lot if any viewers. But it still made me uncomfortable that someone has been streaming my voice without my consent, without my knowledge even. I do not feel that it is unreasonable of me to expect someone to ask for permission before doing this, but maybe I am just completely out of the loop about streaming?

Is it naive to expect privacy in this regard? Is this what one should expect from online gaming nowadays?

eBay is updating its privacy policy, effective next month (2025-04-27). The major change is a new section about AI processing, accompanied by a new user setting with an opt-out checkbox for having your personal data feed their models.

While that page specifically references European areas, the privacy selection appears to be active and remembered between visits for non-Europe customers. It may not do anything for us at all. On the other hand, it seems nearly impossible to find that page from within account settings, so I thought I'd post a direct link.

I'm well aware that I'm anomalous for having read this to begin with, much less diffed it against the previous version. But since I already know that I'm weird, and this wouldn't be much of a discussion post without questions:

• How do you stay up to date with contract changes that might affect you, outside of widespread Internet outrage (such as recent Firefox news)?
• What's your threshold -- if any -- for deciding whether to quit a company over contract changes? Alternatively, have you ever walked away from a purchase, service, or other acquisition over the terms of the contracts?

I've used eBay for many years. It seems to me their support is just getting worse and worse, and their buying experience is beyond confusing.

Most recently, I've been getting an invoice for items that I never committed to buy, I merely asked the seller if combined shipping was a possibility on these items. eBay support first told me that I made a bid on the items. I responded that is incorrect because the items weren't even up for auction, it was a fixed price. They responded with "oh sorry, I see you did not bid, but you did send an offer and if the seller accepts, you must pay the amount". But I never sent any monetary offer, I didn't even request a shipping price.

This is the most recent of a few experiences that just seem beyond confusing to me. Is anyone else having these kind of experiences?

Today I got an email from ebay.

It says:

We wanted to let you know that your eBay account has been permanently suspended because of activity that we believe was putting the eBay community at risk...

Well this is weird because I don't use ebay. I sold some things there over 10 years ago. Since then I may have logged in once or twice. Maybe I reset my password a few years ago to make it more secure. So I couldn't have violated any of their policies.

This is a concern to me because I assume someone has been using my account. I assume they have been logging into it and scamming other people. And the account is linked to my email so the scammer has that. So I don't know if someone found out my address info, credit card, or something else. But I can't login to ebay and change my email or check account history because my account is suspended.

So I contacted customer support and they replied a few hours later that I'm banned for life and the reason can't be told to me.

By the way, I did not reply to the original email or click any links in it. I went directly to the ebay site and contacted customer support through that. I'm sure it wasn't a phishing attempt, it's really ebay and they really banned my account (which I haven't been using).

Any suggestions? In my opinion eBay has not used proper security and is exposing me to risk by not giving more information about what has happened.

Hello there!

A friend of mine has their birthday coming up, me being me, I actually don't care for birthdays much (especially mine) and gifts, in fact, I don't remember the last time I bought anything for anyone, myself included.

But lately, I have the desire to change that. I made a friend through a game and we're really close. I'd like to do something for them. Although my choices are limited and I want it to be a surprise, meaning, I don't want to give them hints that I'm doing anything, like asking for their address. This got me thinking of creating this thread here, if that's alright.

So far, here's what I have in mind:

• Hiring a digital artist to create an artwork about them
• Naming a star after them
• Curating a playlist for them
• Coding a temporary celebratory website they can visit with cheesy stuff that reminds me of them

With that said... Have you ever done this type of thing before? What would you do for a friend you've met online, knowing your choices are virtual and limited? Have you ever received gifts from online friends? What were they?

(Information Superhighway, for you youngin's, was a term that was thrown around quite a bit in the early days of the internet. See also: "world wide web" and "cyberspace")

I'm writing this post to say thanks to the developers, admins, and moderators of Tildes. This is one of the few corners of the internet that hasn't been completely taken over by bots, trolls, shills, or astroturfers. This is a tight-knit community of folks who are good at disagreeing with each other respectfully. It's the way the world should be.

I'm thankful that I can come here and talk about things that I'm uncomfortable discussing elsewhere on the internet or even in the real world.

I came from the great Reddit exodus of 2023. For a while, when I was actively watching the Tildes User Growth chart, I started to worry when it looked like user registrations were stagnating. I even created a post asking the community if it was time to accelerate growth. Thankfully, there was pushback from Tildes veterans who understood that bigger is not necessarily better. I now agree with that sentiment.

Be human, everybody!

I joined MetaFilter in 2016, but I've only ever posted a handful of things there and I've browsed the site very little. I always thought it was a fantastic idea to charge $5 to join. It seems like a great way to counteract ban evasion and prevent people from trolling or behaving badly.

Does this idea that sounds great to me in theory work in practice? MetaFilter seems cool, but my experience with the site is shallow. So, I don't really know.

I'm also curious about people's thoughts and experiences with MetaFilter, perceived differences and similarities with Tildes, and theories about what makes social media and forums and online communities good or bad in general.

Also: wow, while I was writing this, I looked up how big MetaFilter is and it's tiny! This site compiles statistics. Note this important definition:

Active users means users who made at least one comment or post on the selected site in the given month.

There have only been around 2,800 to 2,900 monthly active users for the past year. It's been about 3,000 to 4,000 for the past 5 years. And the absolute peak was January 2011 with 8,100 active users.

The number of users who have ever posted anything to the site is a little less than 48,000.

A stats page from 2013 has more info:

• about 62,500 accounts existed at that time (this means at least 14,500 people have paid $5 for an account and have never posted anything)
• about 39,400 people visited the site while logged into their account that year
• there were 81.7 million unique visitors to the site that year
• the site got 231.4 million pageviews that year

That is wild. I had no idea the number of readers was so much astronomically larger than the number of writers. 39,400 writers (tops!) to 81.7 million readers is crazy.

I'm sad that MetaFilter is so small, has always been small, and seems to be dwindling over the last 12 years. I would have guessed that it had 100,000 monthly active users or 1 million, not 2,900.

I'm trying to go beyond Reddit and Tildes when it comes to some particular interests. I dislike Federated websites due to their usability issues, but I also get the impression that they try to replicate or improve on Twitter. I never used or cared for Twitter in the first place.

I found TrekBBS which looks great, but I was wondering about similar forums for my other interests, such as science fiction literature, classic movies, etc.

So I am curious to know about everyone's favorite old-school forums that are still active and cool!

The websites are not required to be actually old, as long as they work similarly to traditional internet forums.

I'm one of the moderators of a small / medium community. I've been doing it for around a year, with no prior experience at moderating or helping to foster an online community.

We have a section for jokes and humour, and somebody posted one of those "train dilemma" memes. It gave the choice of letting the train hit one of several groups of people. It was general enough to not name anyone specific. The options were similar to:

Let the train hit:
a) Nintendo developers
b) Sony developers
c) Microsoft developers

Fine. A bit crass, but hardly shocking.

A commenter then replied by stating they don't mind which, so long as x well known developer is shot.

Now that really threw me.

The moderation team have been divided over it, although not strongly so. We are all generally in favour of removing it. But we are concerned about over-stepping and of course the topic of free-speech has arisen.

As it came up with us, I'll also mention that there are no specific rules of the website, or this specific sub-community, to state such humour is disallowed.

Where is the line drawn with free-speech? We would certainly remove anything pro-fascism, racist, homophobic or grossly offensive, but we do have rules that cover those.

I'd be really keen to hear any views on how you would approach this and how you would justify your decision.

I'd just like to say that I never make meta posts like this one, but for some reason this topic has really struck a chord with me on this Wednesday evening...

We recently lost a user from Tildes. I don't know which day, but I'd already noticed they weren't around a few days before I did some digging into it. The names here are not important. But this user had been a prolific poster over the last six months. As someone on Tildes who does a lot of tagging, they were high up on my 'user interaction list' in the passive way that comes from amending tags can do.

Some departing users leave all of their contributions behind, along with their username, never to be seen from again. Perhaps they regenerate with a new handle or perhaps they find pastures fresh elsewhere. Some users take all of their topics with them, along with the conversations, the ideas, the thoughts, and in my mind a little piece of the Tildes community. The latter is what happened here with our prolific user.

This has made me unusually sad. There are lots of users I miss on a personal connection level, whether that be the status they held in the community, or simply missing the elegance of their prose. Sometimes they return and I smile at my keyboard. Sometimes I check how they're doing by looking on Reddit. The sadness here comes from a feeling that when a prolific user leaves with their topics, it feels like a library user leaving the country with their borrowed library books. I've never been very good with analogies.

People talk about link rot and video game preservation and the walled gardens of the internet and it feels like this mourning over lost information from a link aggregator with a close-knit community bound up in it fits in there somewhere in the discourse.

In a comment to this topic I'm going to link to as many of the lost topics as I was able to find. These will be direct links to the articles, not to the Tildes discussion. I don't want this act to feel like grave-robbing by linking to deleted Tildes pages.

This is the end of my hopefully only foray into meta posting. I don't think I have the wordsmith-ery for it.

No, really. Sincerely putting this out there.

Using Tildes sometimes feels like talking into the void. The UI, even in Three Cheers, is minimal. The conversations sometimes clinical, though I greatly appreciate the compassion that comes through here versus other places that shall remain nameless.

Yet I am struck. I've seen people here, more recently, cite meeting other Tildans (Tildaniens? Tilwhoseits?).

As a somewhat reclusive 51 year-old married dude with only furry children, I don't get it. But I do know that I need more friendships. It gets harder, as you get older. (As for me, not keeping toxic friendships from school and later 2 decades working remotely led to, well, this.)

So how do you connect with humans as humans here? How do you "make friends"?

Asking as someone who has a diagnosed potent ADHD and perhaps other as yet medically undetermined NDisms.

(No idea what tags to use for this. Help?)

The recent history of social media has made me interested in the factors that make online communities successful/healthy, or toxic etc.. This is one of the appeals of Tildes for me. I'm also emotionally invested in seeing a healthy future for the Irish language, which has seen some interesting developments in the internet age but remains in a precarious position as a community language in the country. You can see how these two interests dovetail together. At the moment this is a thought experiment, but later, who knows...

Tips I've got so far:

I've heard that some barriers to entry can increase group loyalty by making members feels slightly "invested" by earning a place in the community

I've also noted that some of the most persistant subcultures operate online but also have a strong in-person element (eg: furries)

There's also the common observation that good moderation is crucial to user experience and therefore group cohesion

Then I got some pointers from the Tildes docs:

• Trust by default, punish abusers
• Focus on user experience, not growth metrics
• Favour deep engagement over shallow/clickbait
• Empower members to make choices
• The golden rule (apply charitable interpretations, don't tolerate bad actors)

So, people of Tildes: what factors do you see as crucial to building and maintaining a strong cohesive online community?

I'm in the market for an OEM part that usually comes with the "premium" trim of my vehicle. Rather than pay the $2000+ listed on the official parts website, eBay gave me several junkyard/recycler types that list the part for $200-$400. Each of these listing make promises about 60-day returns, warranty, etc.

However, I attempted a buy-it-now (with a CC, not through PayPal), and the sale was cancelled within an hour claiming that the part didn't pass their QA. I made the purchase at 9pm, and I wouldn't expect that quick of a turn. I did send a note thanking the account for not sending something that didn't meet their standards.

Then, it happened again almost exactly the same way, save for a 3pm purchase time and a 45-minute refund turnaround. This is raising a bunch of red flags for me. Am I just having bad luck, being paranoid, or is someone trying to maybe steal credit card info?

I'm thinking that calling local junkyards and just asking if they have the year/model of vehicle I'm looking for and potentially the part. Will take any advice, though.

I've thought about this off and on for like a year.

It, as far as I know, seems well documented that populations are struggling with dating and marriages, especially in the younger generations. A lot of people attribute it to things like finances, working hours, cost of living, etc, but also the abysmal online dating circus. People don't seem to go out with the intention of meeting people as much, and so most turn to apps like Tinder, Bumble, and Hinge. But with these apps basically monopolized by the Match group, and none of the parent companies have an actual incentive to get people off the app, it seems like a ripe opportunity for governments everywhere to try and fill in the gap.

As they don't have the investor profit motive, but they do have a very strong motive for people to get together, have relationships, marriages, eventually babies. And this is just a baseless claim on my part, but I imagine it could be stimulating to local economies as more people go on dates. I know at least my ass doesn't go anywhere really when I'm single.

Cohost.org, an independent social media blogging platform, will be shutting down as early as next month. A lot of users are talking about how their time on Cohost changed the way they think about what an experience in an online community can be like in the modern age of the internet. People saying that they'd rather move forward with spending more time offline and with their hobbies than chasing the next social media site after Cohost's closure. I tend to agree.

After checking an old forum recently that I used to frequent in the heyday of internet forums, I found it filled with racist fear-mongering that is left unmoderated after the driving force of the community passed away half a decade ago. I wonder how much of the spirit of the old web we can realistically rekindle. If you're on Tildes, you probably know everything about the faults of giant social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, or Reddit. Heck, the poor quality the YouTube comments section was a meme when YouTube was new. It was never good on those sites. Just tolerable and everybody was there so you kind of had no choice. Now, many of those platforms are self-imploding.

Cohost, like Tildes, created an atmosphere where you didn't feel like you were committing a moral wrongdoing by not immediately spewing scalding hot takes about current events, drama and conflicts. You were encouraged to write text that wasn't throwaway garbage. You could have meaningful conversations about issues and find an audience. Cohost was not without its flaws. People of colour in particular recently shared experiences of racist harassment on the site that was purely handled by moderation. But overall the takes I'm reading now is that most people will be able to look back on their time on Cohost fondly. I've seen people calling it "the Dreamcast of websites".

Cohost was a social media site that was a joy to visit for me and didn't put me on an edge by interacting with it. I could write posts, long-form posts without pressure to hit out another one-line zinger while a topic "is still relevant". I didn't see endless chains of subtweets that deliberately avoided explicitly mentioning the drama they were commenting on, lest the hate mob find their comment. I didn't get into that kind of unnerving cycle of "I don't know what this post is about, but the infrastructure of this social network suggests it's a moral failure to not chime in on the topic de jour, so I better get going and scan vile tweets for an hour to find out what's going on".

And before you say that this is only a Twitter problem, I have had pretty much exactly the same experiences on Mastodon and especially Bluesky. I feel the same in over-crowded Discord servers where it's very difficult to keep track of what's been talked about and what the current topic of discussion is. I feel the same on the few active forums that still exist, like resetera, where there's just posts upon posts that you're kind of expected to read before you chime in into a thread.

So where to go from here? I'm thinking about setting up my own proper blog, maybe hosted on an own website. That way I can continue to create long form posts about topics I want to. And bring back a little more of the spirit of the old internet. Cohost is dead, but there's no going back to me to doomscrolling. Today I set my phone to aggressively limit my daily usage of Reddit & Mastodon. I said the following when Twitter crashed and burned, but this time I'm not desperate, but genuine when I say: It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.

Do we have any information on how Tildes growth is going?

I only use Tildes, used to only use reddit until they pulled their bullshit last year. I don't use any social media and I feel like I am missing out on a lot of news and things. When I used reddit I had curated my subs to my interests and I feel like I was up to date on everything I wanted to be.

But now, due to Tildes being a much smaller community, the news I receive is much more generalized and I've been noticing a lot of times I miss things. For example because all video games are clumped together in one Games Tildes, only the most popular kinds of gaming news gets posted there, so more specific or niche things I miss.

Another example, I had never heard of Ozempic before the South Park episode, and a friend was shocked and told me I was so out of the loop for not knowing what it was. I'd never seen anyone talk about it on here, so how would I know?

I also notice there's just significantly less engagement overall on Tildes. I can scroll through the front page of Tildes every morning, see maybe half posts I've already seen and half new ones, and by the end of the day there will be a handful of new posts but not many. In its golden years, Reddit would have new posts every few hours with new info or news about different things. Tildes feels really small still.

Point being, I'm curious how Tildes is doing in terms of growth and whether it looks like it'll be getting larger communities which will split more subcategories into the broad categories we have now. Or if it has plateaued and this is how it'll be for good?

Hey there, I am asking for a friend who is interested in transitioning from their career of designing print ads (Photoshop and InDesign) to web design.

I would imagine they would need some courses on responsive design and Figma? But I'll let the people with experience talk if they're here.

Free is preferred but willing to pay if needed! And if you have links or specific online courses you really like and helped you, that would be great!

Thanks in advance!